The Virus That Got Through

Syagnik Banerjee, Professor of Marketing, University of Michigan, shares his thoughts on the criticality of Reading

Reading has been in terminal decline across school districts for some time. Despite the fact that technology seems to have made everything much more accessible, students struggle to read, ingest and understand any textual format that takes longer than a few minutes to complete. This does not augur well for scholastic development.

The Education Advisory Board in USA has been pursuing some ongoing research on the Student Readiness Crisis, which implies that Students who were in elementary school when the pandemic started are not on pace to “recover” by the time they reach college in the next 3-5 years. They found that 33% of K-12 students were chronically absent; 42% of ACT-takers met none of the college-readiness benchmarks in English, Reading, Science, and Math; and 42% of high school students reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, a statistic that is more than 50% higher than just a decade ago.

This crisis is not merely an academic one. It is also a highly socio-emotional and financial problem. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores for 13-year-olds has declined to the levels it was in the 1970s, after peaking in 2012. Its predictions of recovery indicate that, ceteris paribus, tests scores may return to normal in 2032. While the above disruption in the ability to learn “how to learn”, i.e. basic study skills, can be blamed on a natural disaster, i.e., the pandemic, a more resilient and insidious phenomenon has been the decline of IQ scores, observed for the first time in 100 years.

Scholars of Intelligence observed that IQs rose all over the world, over the course of the last century, by about 30 points, from an average of ~100. However, between 2006 and 2018, IQ scores dipped up to 2 points in three areas of declining performance. Scores declined across groups, with the steepest drops among the younger test-takers. This decline in a learner’s “capacity to learn” rather than in the procedural knowledge of learning, had begun to evince itself long before the pandemic hit us. It may be a mere coincidence that the years between 2006 and 2018 also constitute the period during which the popular digital platforms (i.e. search and social media) exponentially grew in revenues to displace traditional media, becoming all-pervasive in everyday life, causing device addiction and adversely affecting mental health.

Learning has thus been hit by both a pandemic (the Covid-19 virus) and an endemic (personalized technologies), which have been in a relationship of symbiotic mutualism. Though Generative AI and its impact on cognitive abilities are yet to be measured, technology seems to be the virus that continues to get through.

Perhaps it is time, therefore, to make some space in our personal lives which affords us solitude, patience, concentration and the ability to reflect and learn. To this end, inculcating the reading habit amongst our children and students is critical. Ultimately, if you cannot concentrate, you cannot become a skilled reader. If you cannot read skilfully, you cannot think deeply. If you cannot think deeply, you can never absorb ideas. And if you cannot absorb ideas, you can never learn and think critically.

And learning is too important to leave to chance.